STAGGERING DESCENTS
The Decade's Top 10 Celebrity Falls From Grace
By Neil BulsonAMERICANS ARE ADDICTED TO CELEBRITIES. We love them. But what we love even more than celebrities is tearing them down and destroying them and watching them squirm under the harsh light of fame.
We lap that stuff up and when we are done gnawing on their bones, we move on to the next victim. This decade has seen its fair share of melt-downs, racist rants, obscene whoring and just plain incompetence.
Lives have been ruined, careers have been lost, and in some cases, people have actually died. And it is with that in mind that we here at Heavy bring you the top 10 celebrity falls from grace of the decade.
10. Chris Brown -- How do you derail a promising music career that has people calling you the next Michael Jackson? Easy. You beat down your hot, famous girlfriend and then spend the ensuing weeks and months giving half-assed apologies that no one buys. Seriously, come on dude. Even OJ probably thinks you went a little too far. I mean, it's bad enough to slap a girl around but there were reports that Brown actually bit Rihanna. How out of your own head do you have to be for that to happen? At this point, I'm surprised they don't wheel Brown out in a straight jacket wearing one of those Hannibal Lecter masks every time he needs to make a public appearance.
9. Amy Winehouse -- Believe it or not, there was a brief window where Amy Winehouse was actually a respected musician and not a cracked out shell of a human being. As meltdowns go, hers was quick and spectacular. A taste of success is enough to drive even the most stable people mad, and when you combine that with the taste of the crack pipe, you're pretty much guaranteed to find yourself on the cover of every magazine looking like a junky, zombified version of Marilyn Manson.
8. Phil Spector -- Sure, everyone knew for years that Spector, the revolutionary pop music producer, was a bit of an eccentric. But being an eccentric is one thing. People can overlook that, especially when you are hailed as a genius. But people tend to frown on it when you straight up kill someone. Indeed. It's a little hard to come back from that sort of thing. One day you're known for the Wall of Sound, the next day you're known for the sound of some poor lady's brains hitting the wall.
7. Tom Cruise-- Apparently, at some point this decade, Cruise became tired of being a mere celebrity and decided to try his hand at being insane. Everyone remembers Cruise couch surfing and scaring the holy hell out of Oprah, and then accosting Matt Lauer for not understanding the evils of psychiatry. It was a hell of a coming out party, and though things have quieted down a bit for Cruise in the last couple of years, the damage has already been done. I can just about guarantee you that the next time you are in a movie theater and a trailer for a film starring Cruise comes on that half the audience will laugh.
6. Mel Gibson -- Once upon a time, Mel Gibson was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. And then he decided to make a little movie about the last days of Jesus, and, well, things kind of changed for Mad Max. Of course, it didn't help that Gibson found himself battling accusations that his film blamed the Jews for Jesus' death. That will tend to put a damper on things. So will getting busted for a DUI, calling a female cop Sugartits and then divorcing your wife and knocking up your new Russian girlfriend.
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While that may sound like a typical Friday night for some of you, for a devout Catholic like Gibson, it kind of caused a little bit of an image problem.
5. Michael Vick -- It wasn't that long ago that Michael Vick was one of Nike's golden boys, an NFL superstar with groundbreaking talent who seemed destined for greatness. Face forward a couple of years, and the only talents that he was putting to use were in the fields of rock breaking and license plate artistry. And last I checked, Nike didn't make an orange jumpsuit. Of course, that will happen when your name gets brought up in connection to a dog fighting ring that comes with allegations that you beat and drowned the dogs who didn't perform up to par. Today, Vick is a backup quarterback in Philadelphia, and whenever his name is brought up, it doesn't call to mind images of him scampering through an opposing defense. Instead, the first thing everyone thinks about is poor Fido getting slammed to the ground and held under water. Not exactly the legacy Vick was going for, I'm sure.
4. Britney Spears -- Look, you're inevitably going to find your way onto this sort of list when you get married on a whim while in Vegas, get a quickie divorce and then dive headfirst into a marriage with a backup dancer who speaks Retardese and then pop out a couple of kids before getting divorced once again, losing your mind, shaving your head and ending up hauled away to the loony bin. I mean, I'm just saying. Of course, that was prior to Spears' comeback, which saw her flop around the stage on national TV in an embarrassing performance, head out on the town sans panties and become the nation's most infamous Cheeto addict. It's a miracle that Spears isn't number one on this list. But that's merely a testament to the absurd depths to which the three stooges ahead of her fell in this glorious decade.
3. Tiger Woods -- I know it just happened, and perhaps we should wait for some perspective here before passing judgment on this whole ordeal, but GOOD LORD. It seems like every day, there is some new stripper or porn star or professional whore or scorned circus midget who adds their name onto the mile long list of women who Tiger Woods apparently waded his way though en route to destroying not only the rest of the PGA Tour but also his marriage and his reputation. What we know is staggering enough. What we don't know is even crazier. I mean, by now we have all seen crazy theories, from Tiger's wife chasing him down and braining him with a golf club to Tiger getting all goofy on painkillers and falling asleep at the wheel. It's not even all of that craziness that really shoots Woods up this high, it's the simple fact that for his entire career, he was almost portrayed as an emotionless robot, a model citizen who woke up, played golf, won, played some more golf, found time to marry a Swedish nanny and then went to sleep every night. To find out that not only is he a real live functioning human being like the rest of us, but also apparently an insatiable degenerate is stunning.
2. Lindsay Lohan -- Honestly, we could just post a side by side picture here, one from the height of her stardom, and one from the past few weeks, and that should say about a billion words. In fact, I am going to suggest to my editor that we do just that. Everybody good with this?
Case closed.
1. George W. Bush -- The ultimate celebrity, the former President once found himself on top of the game, enjoying the approval of much of the free world. Fast forward a few years through a couple of skirmishes in Asia, a rainy day down in New Orleans and an economy that had people reminiscing about the oh so fun 1930's, and Bush found himself as a universal punch line. The dude even had a shoe thrown at him. This man was the President of the United States, a job once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And now, he's an international symbol of staggering incompetence. I mean, seriously, at this point would you give him a job managing a hamburger stand? To be number one on this list, you have to have had a hell of a decade. And really, can you think of anyone else who had a rougher decade than ol' Dubya?
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Neil Bulson is a contributing writer at Heavy.com.
Then here come Mephistopheles to ruin it all.
This hallowed ground. The house where Ralphie and his brother and his mother and his father all lived is now a tourist attraction in Cleveland. Or at least the house where they shot the movie is. 
